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1824 |
School
of Computer Science |
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Weekly Newsletter |
25 November 2013 |
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Contents |
News from the Head of SchoolMovember – last
chances to give The CS@MCR Movember team have raised £805 so far, which is a great achievement but still £450 short of last year’s total. November ends on Saturday, if the team doesn’t meet the target by then, they might have to stay unshaved until next year, so please help them out... There are 32 fabulous Mos you can sponsor individually, or just support the team at http://moteam.co/csmcr Conference
Success! Keletso Joel Letsholo, Liping Zhao and Erol-Valeriu Chioasca won Best Student Tool Demonstration Award at 28th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (Palo Alto, California, November 11-15, 2013) for their tool: “TRAM: A Tool for Transforming Textual Requirements into Analysis Models". The winners were selected by a vote of all conference participants. Congratulations to Joel and Erol!
Facebook session for students Facebook recruiters were in LT.1 and the Lower First on Wednesday 20th NOvember, hosted by the Coding Dojo group. Gabriel Suciu, Marius Popescu, and Miso Zmiric organised an hour of recruitment information, quizzes, and general opportunities to hear about how to get inside the Facebook machine. Many of our students attended and had a great session learning what’s needed for success. The biggest message from Facebook themselves? They've had several great interns and employees from Manchester over the past few years and recognize that this is a great place!
Computer Science Green Impact Team This is a second call for staff
in Computer Science who would like to get involved in a Computer Science Green
Impact Team. The Green Impact Scheme is a
nationwide scheme which is supported by the University, and is a mechanism for
establishing a more sustainable work-place. Within the University there are a
number of teams, based around Schools, Divisions, or in some cases buildings.
The team works through simple criteria in a series of workbooks from Bronze
to Gold, covering areas including energy usage, waste & recycling, travel
and procurement. More information on the Green Impact scheme can be found here. As a new team this year, the
Computer Science Green Impact team would be working towards the Bronze award.
If you are interested in getting involved, whether you are PSS, academic or
research staff, please: ·
Register to access the Green
Impact Workbook for our team ·
Complete this Doodle poll
to indicate your availability for an initial meeting. We are currently
looking at dates in late November / early December – so please be quick! Your involvement can be as much
or as little of your time as you are able to give. The Green Impact Team
would meet two or three times per year to set objectives and assess progress;
we will decide at the initial meeting how we will allocate tasks and what our
priorities will be. Any questions, contact Cassie Barlow. Announcements and newsQueen’s Anniversary Prize A message from the President: I am delighted to inform you
that we have been awarded the Queen’s Anniversary Prize for Higher and
Further Education in its tenth round (2012-14) for our work in imaging
techniques to support advanced materials and manufacturing. The award,
titled by the Queen’s Trust as ‘New Techniques in X-Ray Imaging of
Materials Critical for Power, Transport and Other Key Industries', will
be announced this evening at St James’ Palace. The award is a great honour,
highlighting the excellent work carried out by all our staff. This makes it ‘2-in-a-row’ for
the Faculty following our previous success for Civil Nuclear where we were
awarded the Queen’s Anniversary Prize (2010-12). The actual award ceremony will
be in February 2014 at Buckingham Palace. Once again this award, like
other awards, highlights the excellent achievements of the all the staff at
the University. iGEM Competition, 2014 13
Dec contact deadline For: academic staff, research
staff and PhD students From: Eriko Takano Following on from the success at
this year's World Championship,
we will be putting together another MIB-based iGEM
(International Genetically Engineered Machine) team for the 2014 competition. We are looking for team members
across all scientific disciplines (humanities, economy etc. are also very
welcome). They need to send me their CV
with their course details. Please see PDF for details. I am also looking for
supervisors, so if you would like to be involved next spring/summer, please
let me know. It's hard work, but also very rewarding. Eriko Takano EPSRC Science Photo Competition
2013 16
Dec 13 Win £500
worth of camera/photography equipment with the EPSRC
Science Photo Competition. The competition is open to all EPSRC supported
researchers and PhD students to share their Research in Action using
images. Closing date: 16 Dec 2013 Royal Society –
award and medal nominations 31
Jan 2014 The Royal Society Medals and Awards
2014 call for nominations is open soon. The Milner Award is awarded
for outstanding achievement in CS and there are lots of other categories
available too, from interdisciplinary research to public engagement. If you plan to nominate a member of the School please contact Robert Stevens beforehand with brief details (a
paragraph). Closing date: 31 Jan 2014 EventsScholarship of Teaching and Learning Lunchtime Series How to reduce plagiarism among students without actually saying the P word 25 Nov 13 12-14:00, C24, Sackville Street building Prof. David M. Schultz School of Earth, Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences, University of Manchester “Sources on helping students avoid plagiarism generally take one of three approaches. 1. Assume that students know enough not to copy text directly from sources in the first place, and emphasize disciplinary action. 2. Take a given piece of text and make enough changes that it doesn't look like the source anymore. 3. Provide guidance about "direct quotations", "common knowledge", and "referencing".
None of these three approaches seemed to make a difference in reducing plagiarism in 1–2-page essays written by first-year students in our School. So, we tried a different approach…In this seminar, I will present our approaches and our remarkable results. I would then like to hear from others who have found ways to use the carrot rather than the stick in addressing critical thinking skills among students. Please book your place through Lynn Davies A light lunch will be provided Advanced
Metallic Systems CDT Seminar 26
Nov 13 14:00, E23, The Mill. Asset Integrity - The biggest engineering discipline you’ve never heard of! Dr. Phil Horrocks, Asset Integrity Manager from Centrica. All are welcome and light refreshments will be provided afterwards. Materials Performance Centre-hosted Dalton Nuclear Seminar 26 Nov 13 15:30, D14 Lecture Theatre, Materials Science Centre. Dr. Elisabeth Francis will be giving a presentation on ‘TEM Analysis of Zirconium Alloys Using the “ChemiSTEM” Titan’. All are welcome. Light refreshments will be provided afterwards. Support for Fellowship applications 26
Nov 13 10-13:00, Renold Building F1. A training and development course is available for Applying for Fellowships, as well as tips and thinking points on applying for Fellowships. Plug in your headphones to hear professors share their know-how: http://www.researchsupport.eps.manchester.ac.uk/funding/fellowships/ Talk - GPU
implementations of fluid dynamics simulations on regular meshes 26
Nov 13 14-15:00, Room
B8, George Begg Dr Christian Obrecht (University of Lyon) is talking as part of the MACE/GPU Club on 'GPU implementations of fluid dynamics simulations on regular meshes'. All are welcome. Another Manchester computer pioneer:
Desmond Henry 4 Dec 13 14:00, Lecture Theatre 1.4, Kilburn building Elaine O'Hanrahan. Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Lunchtime series mbclick and Effective Student Feedback 5
Dec 13 12-14:00, G13.D, Sackville Street building Geoff Rubner School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering "For students, feedback is one of the most important, and
complained-about, issues for them. Often
you hear that it’s either given too late, or it’s not given frequently
enough, or it’s not detailed enough, and so forth. With mbclick you
can liven up your lectures by introducing some interaction, and give students
the feedback they want and need! There will be a demonstration with an interactive session, so bring
your mobile phone, tablet, laptop, notebook, etc! The system accepts SMS so you don't even
need a smartphone. Please book your place through Lynn Davies A light lunch will be provided Invitation to launch of the Manchester informatics big data community 9
December 13, all day Chancellors Conference Centre The Big Data Community aims to bring together the University's
strengths in a wide variety of Big Data research (including open data and
linked data) across all faculties to: • Promote
interdisciplinary collaboration in all forms of data research • Improve the
University's responses to funding calls in Big Data • Help raise
Manchester’s profile as a leading centre for Big Data research • Our first event, 'Building the Big Data Community at Manchester,' will
seek to map out the landscape of Big Data research taking place across the
university, work towards building interdisciplinary relationships and begin
to showcase our strengths to external organisations. The day will be facilitated by the Computer Science Team involved in RETHINK:Big, an EU funded
initiative which is writing the Big Data Roadmap for Europe. Manchester is
the only UK university involved in RETHINK:Big and as part of the event the team will be
seeking to engage a wider community from the university in feeding into the
Roadmap. More information and registration EC ICT Information and Networking Event 15-16 Jan 14 EC Conference Centre, Luxembourg Kirchberg Following on from the great success of the Europe's biggest digital
technology event (Vilnius), Information and
Networking days, organised by the Unit Data Value Chain, will take place on
15-16 Jan 2014. The event aims to inform and guide prospective proposers
preparing project proposals, to facilitate sharing of ideas and experiences.
It will give participants the chance to network, to find partners for their
projects and get feedback on proposal ideas from officials of the European
Commission. Focus will be on the following objectives included in the Horizon 2020 work programme 2014-2015 (N.B. linked docs are drafts): ·
ICT 15 – 2014 Big data
Innovation and take-up ·
ICT 16 – 2015 Big data-research
(overview only) ·
ICT 17 – 2014 Cracking the
language barrier ·
ICT 22.a – 2014 Multimodal and
Natural computer interaction More information on the agenda and the registration possibilities will
be available soon here. Funding OpportunitiesResearch Support Office Please contact us through researchsupportcsm@manchester.ac.uk. There is information about support for grant writing and submission at http://staffnet.cs.manchester.ac.uk/reso/ Reminder - H2020 drafts available EU funding-related documents are placed by the
University's EU team at: A great resource recommended by the ICT National
Contact Point is http://www.ictic.org/,
which also provides handy overview documents. Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowship 13 Jan 14 The Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowship is for early stage career researchers (up to 6 years since PhD) who require a flexible working pattern due to personal circumstances such as parenting, caring responsibilities or health issues. Female candidates are particularly invited to apply. Closing date: 13 Jan 2014 Leverhulme-Royal
Society Africa Award 15
Jan 14 Do you have links that you would like to develop with research institutions in either Ghana or Tanzania? 3-year collaborative research funding of up to £60k per year is available through the Leverhulme-Royal Society Africa Award, including up to £10k per year for a PhD Student Bursary. Closing date: 15 Jan 2014 Research Professional is a useful search engine for finding other funding opportunities. Featured Research OutcomesCongratulations to all those involved in the following successful awards! Synchronized
Attention Grant (SAG) Simon Harper, Caroline Jay, Andy Brown (with the BBC and Manchester Informatics) Funding body: EPSRC IAA Exploitation Secondment Award amount: £100.3k (EPSRC + BBC) This project follows on from the KTA Concept and Feasibility Study and the IAA Relationship Incubator with the BBC, which looked at transferring our models of user attention (eye trackers) to model the split of attention on a TV screen. Recent work has focused on mapping the DUV model to additional content (e.g. subtitles, news tickers) and strengthening the metrics needed to drive attention prediction. Now, RA Andy Brown will be seconded to the BBC to develop software crucial for next-generation television broadcasting. We will equip the BBC – and ultimately other broadcasters – with the means to optimally time the provision of content to ‘second screens’ (tablets & mobile devices), so that television can move from the current model of a main screen supplemented with occasional viewer-led mobile use, to an engaging, fully integrated dual screen experience. Our long-term technical objective is to produce a software application that will assist program providers and broadcasters in deciding when to apply additional content to a personal mobile device and details how attention will be synchronized between these devices. Pilot studies will aim to identify a suitable methodology to synchronize unified content between multiple devices. Papers Smallbone K, Mendes P (2013) Large-scale metabolic models:
from http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/ind.2013.0003 Swainston N, Mendes P, Kell DB (2013) An analysis of a http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11306-013-0564-3/fulltext.html Smallbone K, Messiha HL, Carroll
KM, Winder CL, Malys N, Dunn WB, http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0014579313005012 Sha W, Martins AM, Laubenbacher R, Mendes P, Shulaev
V (2013) The http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0074939 Mensonides FIC, Bakker BM, Cremazy F, Messiha HL , Mendes
P, Boogerd FC, http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0014579313005280 Have we missed something? If you have some award news
that you would like us to know about please contact Sarah Chatwin. |
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